


to the edge of the earth (it's a brave new world from the last to the first)

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: long and happy was their reign [9]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Asexual Character, BAMF Lucy, BAMF Pevensies, Bisexual Male Character, Character Study, Character Study of the Pevensie Family as a Whole, Edmund Stays, F/F, F/M, Family, Gay Character, Introspection, Love, M/M, Personal Growth, Polyamory, Sibling Bonding, Susan Pevensie Never Forgot, The Pevensie Family is Fucking Awesome, The Problem of Susan, Women Being Awesome, the power of ordinary people in extraordinary situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 14:23:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16431113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: (It all comes back to a boy and his wars. It all comes back to him sitting on a throne, staring at a crown, knowing that his world may crumble into pieces with one wrong touch. It all comes back to him refusing to accept his brother’s cowardice, his sister’s recklessness, his sister’s fallibility, only seeing their strengths rather than their flaws.)This is the Story of the Pevensies-Susan the Gentle, ruler of a kingdom of her own making;Abraham Miller, teacher and lover;Lucy the Valiant, goddess in a thousand worlds;Edmund the Just, the Once and Future King;Claudia Thomas, the Impossible MP;Peter the Magnificent, High King turned teacher;Anna-Mae Brown, doctor above all else;Caspian the Seafarer, one of the Warrior Kings;Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Dragon-Kin;Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived Twice;Dean Edmund Thomas, Professor and brother.(In the end, it all comes back to that boy, staring at a lantern, staring at a witch, staring at a tree, and deciding to step back and turn around.It all comes back to a single family, and the way their all-too-human want for their own happiness shapes entire worlds.)





	to the edge of the earth (it's a brave new world from the last to the first)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "This is War" by 30 Seconds to Mars, which I basically wrote this fic to.
> 
> Quotes in the story are from the poem "Wishbone" by Richard Siken.
> 
>  
> 
> Small update has been made and this story now includes Harry as a Pevensie because fuck it, in this 'verse he is.

_You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet_

_lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because  
_

_it’s all I have,  
_

_because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own._

 

 

It all comes back to a boy and his wars. It all comes back to him sitting on a throne, staring at a crown, knowing that his world may crumble into pieces with one wrong touch. It all comes back to him refusing to accept his brother’s cowardice, his sister’s recklessness, his sister’s fallibility, only seeing their strengths rather than their flaws.

It comes back to a ten-year-old boy deciding that he is more than willing to die, if it only means destroying the White Witch’s greatest weapon.

-

There is a girl who has made herself goddess, who saw something wrong with the world and used her boundless curiosity to find a solution. She became something beyond human comprehension, took magic and made it her very being. She learned the paths between worlds, how to move backward through every universe and into worlds before Aslan himself, worlds where the laws of physics have not yet been born and the Deep Magic is not even a spark in anyone’s mind.

Her very words can break universes, spin new worlds into being. She has watched the rise and fall of empires, the event collapse and rebirth of entire universes. She has fought wars in worlds Aslan himself couldn't imagine, healed injuries from poisons that don't exist in her world, created creatures that are hybrids of things that cannot be found in Narnia or Earth.

And all of this, every ounce of her power, was born out of a need to protect the family she loves so dear. Her siblings, her cousins, her nieces and nephews and their spouses, their children, their friends, a whole host of lovers and allies and friends across a thousand worlds: she Names them all her own, swears to protect them under her power.

-

There is a boy who is a dragon who is a soldier, a boy who spends his life with fire pricking under his skin and through his nostrils. He becomes a knight, learns to exist in a world that is not his own.

He knows what it’s like to be have the power to just reach out and bruise someone with just one touch of his claws, what it's like to have the power to crush people with one hand and to choose to use it for good rather than harm.

He is a boy who was once a dragon who was once a boy, who decided to set aside the world he knew and understood in favor of a world where he could learn a new right and wrong.

(When he first entered Narnia, he thought it unnatural. Now, he cannot remember what is like to be only small, never Dragoned, without fire humming under his skin and fangs protruding from his gums.

All he can remember now is how a mouse taunted a small, cowardly boy into a duel, and how that mouse whispered songs into the ear of a dragon.)

-

There is a woman who falls in love with England and two wonderful people, who decides to build her own kingdom out of law books and matza and faith in her family. She substitutes her crown and flowing gowns for hair pulled back in a bun and pant suits, turns her words into arrows and her love into blades.

When her son is born, she kisses him gently on the forehead before handing him over to his father and his other mother to hold. She names him after his Uncle, a Prince and a King and a Protector of Men. She names him after his father’s father, a man who fought for his country during a Great War and who later settled down to be a doctor. She names him after his other mother, the woman who birthed him and raised him and would eventually die for him.

She holds her baby son, revels in his tiny, dark, wrinkled toes and fingers, admires the amount of life she sees in his tiny, squirming body.

The love that arises in her chest is a savage one. In her son she sees her brothers, her sister, their youth and happiness and promise, and she doesn't want to see that destroyed by thoughtless gods. She wants him to have a good life, one protected from monsters and old men who think themselves righteous.

She never quite imagined having a child that she could love like this.

(Seventeen years later, she kisses both her sons hard on the forehead before they all head into a battle that will kill dozens and end a war that killed thousands.)

-

There is a King who was once a Telmarine Prince, escaping his own home in the middle of the night due to his own uncle trying to kill him.

He spent his childhood feeling out of place, wanting to love a man in the way that the Telmarines said he can't, but that the Narnians of Legend were able to.

He fights a war for their independence of Narnia, then watches as the Great Kings and Queens leave once again for their world. He stares, joyous, anxious, as one of them turns back, a man with just as much bitterness in his eyes as Caspian has in his. He gives up his throne- _a_ throne, not _his_ throne, a throne he never truly had claim to- to this King, now the High King, without regret.

He then marries the Once and Future King, a man who balances him out in all of the most important ways, and they build a kingdom to rival the Golden Age.

-

There is a man training to be a school teacher who heads out to a bar one night. This isn't his normal sort of activity, to be honest- he'd rather be home playing chess with his friends, listening to the radio, or baking- but tonight is someone's birthday and so he goes.

Tonight he meets two women- a bun-haired woman in lipstick and nylons, suit worn as armor, and a dark-skinned woman with ink from protest signs pressed into the creases of her palms. He ends up spending the whole night in conversation with them around a table, smoke filling their lungs and alcohol on their lips.

(Within three weeks, he goes home one night from the bar with lipstick smeared on the corner of his lips and a promise for another date for three in his ears.)

Over the next few years, he becomes a teacher, falls in love, and helps purchase a house outside of London, where they can be happy and not afraid of being in love.

Every night he returns home to his lovers, to their small home and eventually their son. Their son takes after all his parents rather well- he is kind like his father, brave like his mothers, and smart like all of them. He ends up being the reason they all adopt the boy down the street as part of the family.

When both of his sons end up having magic in their veins, it's not a surprise. Their mother is a Queen- how could they be anything but powerful?

-

There is a High King who once ruled over the Golden Age, who wielded the greatest sword known to Narnia, but who stepped back and became teacher when he no longer recognized his body as his own.

He is no longer High King, and though he sometimes misses it, he wouldn’t give up his current work for anything. The children he gets to help, the help he provides them, is worth every battle he does not get to fight in anymore, every Council decision he does not get to make.

His skin is tanned and freckled in the sun, barely recognizable to the man he was back in England. He kisses his wife and smells Narnia against her skin, and despite the pain it sometimes gives him he loves it.

(He was told he could not return to Narnia, and yet he did. He has no idea how it happened, though. He has not seen the lion since he returned.

He does not quite care, though, how it happened, only that it did. This world is the one he belongs in, regardless of what a lion may wish.)

-

There is a boy who grows up with three parents, who grows up learning the powers of ambition and faith and love. His father is a teacher who can encourage thought and wonder in his children and his mothers are powerful women who bend the laws to their whims. He is raised on fairytales and realities, learning how one can do anything if one only puts one's mind to it.

He meets a boy at a playground, recognizes the bitterness in his eyes, and becomes his friend. He becomes his brother and drags him to Hannukahs and on vacations and into a world where he is loved.

He becomes a wizard and healer and husband, fights a war that his brother is the involuntary hero of. He wears green and red, silver and gold. He finds bravery in the small things: in his boyfriend’s mischievous smile, his best friend’s brilliant mind, his parents’ love, his brother’s ambition, his own faith.

(As he runs through the woods and a castle, tossing spells behind him and fighting to hold entire armies from his home, he resembles his Royal family more than he will ever realize. He is a hero, with bravery in the same desperate vein as his aunt and uncles and mother, and he is Prince in all the ways he will never know.)

-

There is a woman with a list of Impossible Things. She knows herself to be one of those things, to be Doctor and Queen Consort despite the stigma against the color of her skin.

When her fiance and her are swept into a world he used to rule, she does not panic. She changes into proper Narnian dress, rolls up her sleeves, and sets herself to reworking the medical system of an entire country.

She is nothing royal or powerful, nothing magical or incredible; she is just an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary world. She is nothing but elbow grease and smart thinking and all-too-human stubbornness.

(And sometimes, that’s all you need to remake the world.)

-

There is a boy with a scar on his forehead and skin a far different color than the relatives that hate him, who is given a home with a family who still doesn't look like him but still loves him.

When he enters school alongside the boy who has become his best friend, they are sorted into different houses and yet they remain brothers. They are still best friends, still study and eat and celebrate holidays together.

He is referred to as the Chosen One, the Boy Who Lived, and he doesn't care. What matters to him is the happiness of the people he loves, the family he has built for himself in the aftermath of the war that took his parents' lives.

(There will be a battle, and the woman who thinks of herself as his mother will die. He will be there at her funeral, just as much a member of her family as her biological son or her partners, and he will mourn her as her child.)

-

There is an MP who spends her adulthood filling out paperwork, waving protest signs and trying anything that will make a difference in this world. She falls in love with a sharp-eyed lawyer and a soft schoolteacher, builds a world she never could have dreamed of within the rooms of a house in Surrey.

When her girlfriend tells her that she was once a Queen in another world, she doesn’t believe at first. How could she? She is a woman who has built her life not on fairytales, but on what she could see in front of her. She is not who she is today because of magic.

But then again, she is who she is today because she wished to change things and she found a way to make it happen. Perhaps kingdoms and magic are not very far-fetched ideas, when dreams can be made real, even if they are impossibilities.

With acceptance of her lover's world, though, comes a bitter resentment toward the God who ripped her away from it. No being should have the right or the power to do such a thing.

(Years later she dies, her family’s names on her lips, in a battle to defend her sons’ world from a different man who thinks himself a god.)

-

There is a boy who does the unthinkable. He stops at the entrance to a tree and steps back.

He knows himself better in this body, in this world, than he does in any other. He knows the weight of a crown on his shoulders, the back aches caused by a throne, the taste of guilt after a battle. He knows what it is to be traitor, to spend one’s entire life trying to atone for one’s crimes.

He has fallen in love with this world, with the taste of magic on his tongue and the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. He relishes the way this world lets him better himself through bettering the world, how it gives him a chance to become something greater than he ever could have been in England.

(He thinks he might be able to also fall in love with this Prince in front of him, with his honest brown eyes, honorable words, and reckless bravery.)

And he decides to stay.

-

There is a train ride that isn’t taken- or maybe it is, in the wrong order, at the wrong time, and no one dies.

There is no funeral where a girl is forced to bury everyone and everything she loves, forced to identify the bodies of the ones she loves under the wreckage of a smoldering metal and then bury her childhood and her family on a cold spring morning.

There is no Lady of the Green Kirtle, no funerals for the Pevensie family, no star’s daughter becoming the Consort of a King.

Instead, three Kingdoms are born. The new High King and his Consort rebuild Narnia from the ashes of Telmarine rule, a lawyer crafts a family and a law agency in the harsh environment of English society, and a girl becomes a goddess and creates an entire universe of her own want.

There are new wars, new journeys, new lives created by the Pevensies in this world. Everything changes when a boy decides to stay instead of acquiescing to the demands of a lion, a creature called Messiah by a world that does not know of what lies beyond the Deep Magic.

-

This is the Pevensies and their families, the worlds they made after a lion tore them away from the lives they worked to build.

-

In the end, it all comes back to that boy, staring at a lantern, staring at a witch, staring at a tree, and deciding to step back and turn around.

It all comes back to the lion and the way one family rebelled after he stole them from their lives. It comes back to the way they all forged their own lives in defiance of how they were tossed aside.

It all comes back to defiance, to choice and bravery and ambition. It comes back to justice, to knowing one's place in the world, to making your story your own.

It all comes back to a single family, and the way their all-too-human want for their own happiness shapes entire worlds. 

 

 

_Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky?_

_Do you want to go home now?_

_There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet  
_

_staring up at us like we’re something interesting._

_This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,  
_

_and make a wish._


End file.
